The following computer-generated description may contain errors and does not represent the quality of the book:Arago placed the daguerreotype amongst the most remarkable conquests of genius, by the side of the telescope and the electric battery. And indeed to every enlightened mind, the fixing of the image or picture of the 'camera obscura' or dark chamber by chemical agents, must appear a great event in the history of progress. An art so novel, capable of producing at the very outset such strange results, at once stamped itself as something grand, extraordinary, as a work full of vitality and vigour.

Franklin's words with respect to the balloon, 'It is the infant just beginning to grow,' could not have been applied to the daguerreotype, which has grown and prospered with such rapidity as to have had, so to speak, no childhood or growth at all. The daguerreotype is one of the latest of the prodigies of modern science; it was discovered in 1838.

The daguerreotype, as soon as born, transformed itself into the photograph.